I was twelve when I realised I was gay. Uncommonly, and with great privilege, I was blessed with the accepting arms of both my family and my friends, and in turn, my sexuality quickly became a trademark of my personality. Lesbian flags adorned my walls, I went to Pride every year, and I almost exclusively consumed queer books, TV shows, and movies. My interest in politics was propelled by the global push to legalise gay marriage and queerness became a consistent conversation topic of mine. Mind you, at this point, I hadn’t even kissed a girl.
In these early days of exploring my sexuality, my music taste was also dominated by music about liking girls. In a deep dive down my Spotify history, I’ve found a few long-forgotten playlists: “she means everything to me” and “playing 1950”, both lyrical references to early genre-defining sapphic music. Often soft and pacifying, I welcomed this as a young teenager, craving to hear my feelings validated in songs so specific to the lesbian experience, yet so detached from a real romantic story. The blueprint typically involved a romanticised secret love, loving your best friend, breaking metaphorical walls, and celebrating very stereotypical feminine features.
They were usually never the type of songs that a straight man or woman, or even a gay man, would find any morsel of relatability in. Going back to the song that my playlist was named after, 1950 by King Princess, the song revolves around a lover romanticising a historical time when queerness was defined by secrecy and “coding” (private indicators like carabiners, nail colours, and earring styles, for example, to signal sexuality), and coping with unrequited love through this.
Sara Quin of Tegan and Sara, one of the first mainstream indie pop duos to be openly gay, said in a New York Times interview in 2016: “I think that the second people find out a woman is gay, it sort of makes their voice, or their value, very specific and very other.” To exist as a gay female pop artist in the 2000s or 2010s often meant your music was purely defined by the fact you were a gay woman. Your music is no longer capable of being mainstream, your message is no longer a universal one, and your art is reduced to who you’re sleeping with.
“To exist as a gay female pop artist in the 2000’s or 2010’s often meant your music was purely defined by the fact you were a gay woman. Your music is no longer capable of being mainstream, your message is no longer a universal one, and your art is reduced to who you’re sleeping with”
It was largely because of this that around the age of 14 or 15, I found myself deep in the rabbit hole of “gaylorism”, a subsection of the Swiftie fandom. I, along with a swath of other young gay women on Tumblr, tired of surface-level, forced “lesbian anthems”, got lost in an (admittedly rather delusional) internet conspiracy theory that Taylor Swift was a bisexual or lesbian woman, who had been in prior relationships with Dianna Agron of Glee stardom and model Karlie Kloss.
To find music that didn’t necessarily define itself by the sexuality of the person singing was an avid pursuit of mine, as my sexuality found a comfortable place within me, not as the primary facet of my personality, but rather as one piece of a very complicated puzzle. I yearned for a musical love story I could relate to what was happening in my own life, and ‘Kaylor’ (Karlie Kloss and Taylor Swift) was just that. The idea that two feminine and famous women were secretly in love for years and that the entire Reputation album chronicled that forbidden story was exhilarating. And if you’re rolling your eyes and calling me disrespectful for that, I was 15, and I found myself in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic. I was bored, gay and stuck in my room – and that is all the explanation that is required!
Refreshingly, in recent years I’ve been able to “see the light”, so to speak, and I think a massive reason for that is the real insurgence of positive, sexually liberated, queer female pop artists. Artists who are open about their sexuality, even if it’s just the fact they aren’t straight, and create mind-blowing albums that embrace, but are not centred upon, their queerness.
Billie Eilish is one such artist who faced immense criticism in 2021 for “queerbaiting” with the music video for her single Lost Cause, in which she suggestively dances with women in a house and subsequently captioned the video “I love girls.” The attempted cancellation of her from this was frankly bizarre. First and foremost, she was 19 at the time, and I could not fathom (as someone who is currently 19) feeling comfortable enough in my sexuality to preface art with a vulnerable, public coming out. Secondly, her age aside, society’s strange obsession with labelling people’s sexualities, particularly celebrities we do not know personally in the slightest, has always been a massive barrier to allowing the kind of liberated, detached queer pop that the community so deserves.
“Society’s strange obsession with labelling people’s sexualities, particularly celebrities we do not know personally in the slightest, has always been a massive barrier to allowing the kind of liberated, detached queer pop that the community so deserves”
Since then, Eilish has come out as bisexual – which I secretly hope served as a quiet “F U” to those who accused her of queerbaiting three years earlier. Her subsequent album, HIT ME HARD AND SOFT, includes songs like LUNCH that embrace lesbian sex as something fun, exciting, and sexy, which would have been completely foreign in mainstream sapphic music even just ten years ago. Alongside that are several other tracks about various specific romantic situations and breakups personal to her. The listener doesn’t know who they are about and they don’t need to, yet the album as a whole is, simply put, hot and queer.
Chappell Roan, particularly through The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess, has also defined herself as one of the key harbingers of the lesbian renaissance. Songs like Red Wine Supernova and Naked in Manhattan are undeniably queer, but they are also so much more. They are vulnerable anthems about sexual awakenings, popping out of the bubble of compulsory heterosexuality, and loving women loudly. Moreover, Femininomenon and After Midnight aren’t even about one lover in particular, yet they succeed at being so blatantly queer at the same time.
“They are vulnerable anthems about sexual awakenings, popping out of the bubble of compulsory heterosexuality, and loving women loudly”
She is unapologetically authentic in her sexuality, which is so refreshing for young queer girls who’ve spent a lifetime down internet rabbit holes or reading between the lines of music to find organic sapphic pop; it’s everywhere. And it’s not just lesbians who are loving it – The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess is challenging The Tortured Poets Department for number one on Billboard this week.
Chappell Roan is out and proud as a lesbian woman, and every element of her performances reflect that. From having local drag artists as her openers, to being best friends with Elton John, she has truly defined and mastered the zeitgeist of this new era of queerness, and she’s not going anywhere.
Above all else, I’m welcoming the detachment in music between sexual identity and experiencing sexuality. To know and to be affirmed that you can love freely without explicitly mentioning who that lover is (or what their gender is), is a massive 180 from the “Queer Pop” that defined my early teenage years, and it’s refreshing to know artists don’t have to hide such an important part of themself to be accepted (and adored) by the mainstream.
